Larry Wall, programmer, linguist, author, born March 10, 1949 in Duncan, British Columbia, Canada, is most widely known for his creation of the Perl computer language in 1987.
Wall is the author of the rn Usenet software and the nearly universally used patch. He has won the IOCCC twice and was the recipient of the first Free Software Foundations award for the Advancement of Free Software in 1998.
Beyond his technical skills, Wall is known for his wit and often ironic sense of humor, which he displays in the comments to his source code or on Usenet for example, "We all agree on the necessity of compromise. We just can't agree on when it's necessary to compromise").
Larry Wall is a trained linguist, which helped him with his book writing, as well as with the design of Perl. He is the co-author of Programming Perl (often referred to as the Camel Book), which is the definitive resource for Perl programmers. He has edited the Perl Cookbook. His books were published by O'Reilly.
Wall continues to oversee further development of Perl and serves as the Benevolent Dictator for Life of the Perl project.
See also
External links
- Larry Wall's personal home page
- Perl Cookbook
- Programming Perl
- Authoritative list of Larry Wall quotes
- Quotes by Larry Wall (Wikiquote)
- Perl, the first Postmodern Language
- State of the Onion keynotes: 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004